Quotes from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“When I run the world, librarians will be exempt from tragedy. Even their smaller sorrows will last only for as long as you can take out a book.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“The happening and telling are very different things. This doesn’t mean that the story isn’t true,
only that I honestly don’t know anymore if I really remember it or only remember how to tell it. Language does this to our memories, simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An off-told story is like a photograph in a family album. Eventually it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“In the phrase ' human being,' the word 'being' is much more important than the word 'human.' ”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“Language does this to our memories—simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“The world runs,” Lowell said, “on the fuel of this endless, fathomless misery. People know it, but they don’t mind what they don’t see. Make them look and they mind, but you’re the one they hate, because you’re the one that made them look.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“In everyone's life there are people who stay and people who go and people who are taken against their will.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“You learn as much from failure as from success, Dad always says. Though no one admires you for it.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“I wonder sometimes if I'm the only one spending my life making the same mistake over and over again or if that's simply human. Do we all tend toward a single besetting sin?”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“I'm unclear on the definition of person the courts have been using. Something that sieves out dolphins but lets corporations slide on through.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“Sometimes you best avoid talking by being quiet, but sometimes you best avoid talking by talking.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“When there is an invisible elephant in the room, one is from time to time bound to trip over a trunk.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“I thought there were moments to complain about your parents and moments to be grateful, and it was a shame to mix those moments up.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“The spoken word converts individual knowledge into mutual knowledge, and there is no way back once you've gone over that cliff. Saying nothing was more amendable, and over time I'd come to see that it was usually your best course of action.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“You know how everything seems so normal when you’re growing up,” she asked plaintively, “and then comes this moment when you realize your whole family is nuts?”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“I didn't want a world in which I had to choose between blind human babies and tortured monkey ones. To be frank, that's the sort of choice I expect science to protect me from, not give me.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“No Utopia is Utopia for everyone”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“But where you succeed will never matter so much as where you fail.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“I still haven't found the place where I can be my true self. But maybe you never get to be your true self, either.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“The sunset you see is always better than the one you don’t. More stars are always better than less.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“Antagonism in my family comes wrapped in layers of code, sideways feints, full deniability. I believe the same can be said of many families.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“The secret to a good life,” he told me once, “is to bring your A game to everything you do. Even if all you’re doing is taking out the garbage, you do that with excellence.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“You can’t imagine the white-hot fury someone who can’t sleep has toward the beautiful dreamer beside him.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“Language is such an imprecise vehicle I sometimes wonder why we bother with it.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“But no one is easier to delude than a parent; they see only what they wish to see.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“Airports and train stations are where you get to cry”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“The value of money is a scam perpetrated by those who have it over those who don't”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“If stupid were fuel, we would never run out.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“It seems to me that every time we humans announce that here is the thing that makes us unique--our featherless bipedality, our tool-using, our language--some other species comes along to snatch it away. If modesty were a human trait, we'd have learned to be more cautious over the years.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“Over the years I’ve come to feel that the way people respond to us has less to do with what we’ve done and more to do with who they are.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“I am the daughter of a psychologist. I know that the thing ostensibly being studied is rarely the thing being studied. (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, p. 99)”
― Karen Joy Fowler, quote from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

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“What about the whiskey?" Jack said as they ran. "Won't it keep them out?"
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“To me, the conclusion that the public has the ultimate responsibility for the behavior of even the biggest businesses is empowering and hopeful, rather than disappointing. My conclusion is not a moralistic one about who is right or wrong, admirable or selfish, a good guy or a bad guy. My conclusion is instead a prediction, based on what I have seen happening in the past. Businesses have changed when the public came to expect and require different behavior, to reward businesses for behavior that the public wanted, and to make things difficult for businesses practicing behaviors that the public didn't want. I predict that in the future, just as in the past, changes in public attitudes will be essential for changes in businesses' environmental practices.”
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“My arms flew up of thier own accord knoking my bag down. I grabbed hold of the desk to keep myself from falling down.”
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“And if candor
strikes to forcefully,
step back, draw careful
breath, and consider the angle
your words must take
before you open
your mouth, let them leak
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